International Olympiad for Informatics
The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual international informatics competition for individual contestants from various invited countries, accompanied by social and cultural programs. The IOI is one of the five international science Olympiads, and is one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world. The number of participating countries has continuously increased, with more than 900 participants and 85 countries attending this year for the IOI2018 in Tsukuba, Japan.
Each participating country selects a team of up to four contestants to represent their nation, along with one team leader and one deputy leader. Students compete individually and try to maximize their score by solving a set of informatics problems during two competition days. On each of the days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours.
Angus Ritossa (Year 11) was selected for the second consecutive year to represent Australia. This year he was chosen as the top ranked informatician invited to attend the Australian Mathematics Trust (AMT) Informatics Selection School. This in itself is no mean feat, but Angus surpassed this with his superb performances during the competition in Tsukuba which placed him 33rd in the World, for which he was awarded a Silver Medal, missing out on the Gold Medal by the narrowest of margins! As the youngest member of the 2018 Australian team, Angus is well placed to again be selected to represent Australia in 2019.
Further photographs and an insight to the team’s time in Japan can be viewed here
Australian Informatics Olympiad
The Australian Informatics Olympiad (AIO) is a 3-hour competition that requires students to write computer code (C, C++, Java, Python etc.) to solve a number of problems that are best solved via coded computation.
Each problem must first be deconstructed in such a manner that an efficient solution algorithm can be generated, which considers all possible cases contained within the problem. The algorithm must then be coded using one of the allowed computer languages and compiled on the local machine for testing purposes. Once a program is considered a success by the contestant, it is submitted to ORAC, a remote machine which then compiles and executes the program as part of the judging process. The ultimate success of a program is determined by how efficiently it can produce correct results for a large number of diverse test cases.
The results this year were excellent. In the Senior Olympiad competition, Angus Ritossa (Year 11) and Eric Zhou (Year 11) achieved Gold and Silver awards respectively, and in the Intermediate Olympiad competition, Nicholas Koh (Year 8) achieved a Bronze award.
A special thank you to Angus Ritossa for his continued efforts and passion in supporting the Informatics component of the Maths@Saints program through his mentoring of up and coming informaticians, especially Eric and Nicholas.
Australian Mathematics Competition Results
The Australian Mathematics Competition (AMC) was introduced in Australia in 1978 as the first Australia-wide mathematics competition for students. Since then it has become the largest single event on the Australian education calendar.
This year marked the first year that boys from St Peter’s College sat the online version of the competition, with remarkably few digital issues. Once again, the results were outstanding.
| Prizes | High Distinction | Distinction | Credit | Proficiency | Participation | |
| Year 7 | 1 | 4 | 23 | 17 | 5 | 1 |
| Year 8 | 1 | 4 | 30 | 32 | 20 | 2 |
| Year 9 | 1 | 6 | 21 | 48 | 19 | 5 |
| Year 10 | 0 | 6 | 27 | 38 | 11 | 1 |
| Year 11 | 5 | 12 | 6 | 3 | ||
| Year 12 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
Congratulations to Darren Nguyen (Year 7) who won the Best in School Award, and also to Nicholas Koh (Year 8) and Zihao Wu (Year 9) who were both awarded prizes for their respective performances.
Alex Smith
Maths@Saints Coordinator
